Ruigang Liang
2026
ReasMark: A Robust Watermark for Attributing LLM Reasoning Under Knowledge Distillation Attacks
Peizhuo Lv | Ruihua Zhou | Yunpeng Li | Ruigang Liang | Xingshuo Han | XiaoFeng Wang | Wei Dong | Yuling Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Peizhuo Lv | Ruihua Zhou | Yunpeng Li | Ruigang Liang | Xingshuo Han | XiaoFeng Wang | Wei Dong | Yuling Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reasoning-enhanced large language models rely on intermediate reasoning signals to solve complex, multi-step tasks, making reasoning behavior a valuable form of intellectual property. Meanwhile, knowledge distillation enables an adversary to replicate this behavior in a realistic black-box setting by repeatedly querying a deployed model on a target domain and training a local student to imitate its outputs, including reasoning traces. Existing LLM watermarks primarily operate on surface text and decoding-time token biases, and thus fail to provide reliable attribution of reasoning behavior once it is transferred through knowledge distillation. ReasMark entangles the watermark with the target-domain input distribution by selecting watermark tokens from high-frequency prompts, so distillation queries naturally activate it. It then embeds the watermark by score-conditioned losses that create a detectable reasoning-length gap for black-box verification. Comprehensive experiments across multiple LLMs, datasets, and distillation settings demonstrate that ReasMark consistently outperforms existing baselines while preserving task utility.